Lightbend, IBM help enterprises operationalize big data

Lightbend, the company behind Akka, Play and Lagom Framework Reactive Platforms, and the Scala programming language, has joined hands with IBM to help enterprises operationalize big data across their application infrastructure. With this partnership, Lightbend will be able to bring Reactive Systems patterns to enterprise developers creating applications purpose-built for Big Data. It will also modernize enterprise application stack for ‘Fast Data’ through support for IBM Data Science Experience. The company claims that as data scientists and big data assets become part of the fabric of enterprise software, application developers are faced with the reality of handling ‘fast data’ which is also known as data in motion, and traditional batch architectures must evolve to stream-based architectures. Using these systems, live data is captured, processed, and used to modify behavior with response times of seconds or less. There is major business value in sub-second response times to changing information but that advantage can only be captured by enterprises with the application architecture equipped for the speed and resilience requirements of fast data.

Mark Brewer, CEO, Lightbend says, “Analytics was the first ‘killer app’ for big data, but what we’re seeing today is a need for mainstream enterprise developers to take the algorithms, analytics and dataflows out of big data silos and to operationalize it across the application infrastructure, to power everything from user-facing applications to IoT pipelines. In order to build data-first applications, enterprises need to have the models and pipelines from data scientists combined with the developer capabilities to operationalize that data into modern, microservices-based applications built for scale and resilience.”

According to Lightbend, enterprises such as Walmart, Verizon, iHeartRadio, William Hill, and Samsung have adopted their Reactive Platform to build low latency, fast data applications based on modern micro-service architectures. The platform and professional services that the company delivers claim to be popular options for enterprises who leverage the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and JVM-languages like Java and Scala and seek the characteristics of application resiliency and extreme scale defined by the Reactive Manifesto.

“Reactive technologies are being leveraged as a core trait that enterprises must achieve in their development infrastructure to help data science become a cornerstone of modern application construction. Lightbend has a rich history of empowering companies across all industries to leverage this technology and, as part of the Data Science Experience, will be able to help even more companies bring this vision into reality,” says Ritika Gunnar, Vice President, Offering Management, IBM Analytics.